Dialog
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Mind the Gap: Theory-of-Mind-Grounded Friction for Epistemic Alignment
2026-08-31 12:57:29Yifan Zhu, Kyeongmin Rim, James PustejovskyAbstract
Productive dialogue alignment requires distinguishing \emph{surface coordination} (acknowledgments and smooth task progression) from \emph{epistemic alignment} (convergence of belief states); standard preference-based methods typically optimize response-level preferences without explicitly modeling the latter. We operationalize Theory-of-Mind (ToM) inference as a control signal within Frictive Policy Optimization by extracting, at each referring expression, a four-part belief structure: the speaker's intended referent, the addressee's interpretation, and each participant's model of the other's belief. This makes friction mechanically computable from epistemic-state comparisons, capturing \emph{silent divergence}, where both participants proceed confidently while grounding to different referents. We evaluate the signal at two levels. At the representation level, ablating the second-order channel reduces misunderstanding recall from $65\%$ to $26\%$. At the policy level, reward-shaping (FAR) and trust-region (FTR) variants improve intervention F1 and warranted-context calibration over DPO, with Brier scores independently supporting the calibration gains. Across three training runs, FAR and FTR remain substantially more stable, whereas DPO varies widely and can degrade intervention competence already present in the base policy. Thus, ToM-grounded friction provides a trainable signal for context-sensitive intervention under referential belief divergence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30719
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The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies
2026-08-31 09:30:05Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit ChoudhuryAbstract
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used as proxies for human participants in social science research, yet it remains unclear whether they can faithfully simulate diverse and conflicting human value systems. We present a World Values Survey (WVS)-grounded simulation framework where culturally diverse agents with different communication styles engage in longitudinal, value-laden discussions. Across approximately 4,000 conversations involving 1,200 personas, 15 topics, and three models (GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and Gemma-4-E4B), we evaluate value faithfulness, value drift, and conversational realism. We find that more than 50\% of personas fail to express their assigned WVS profiles from the outset, while 2-7\% drift after repeated conversations. Ablations removing demographic details improve faithfulness for some models but do not change the broader trend: simulated value distributions still systematically deviate from the assigned WVS profiles. Compared to human discussions, simulated dialogues show a different trade-off between stylistic consistency and semantic diversity, often producing content-wise varied but stylistically repetitive exchanges. These findings suggest that current LLM agents can generate plausible conversations, but remain limited proxies for representing and preserving diverse human value profiles over time.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05514
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Learning to Reason and Use Tools through Unsupervised Fine-Tuning in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
2026-08-31 08:22:26Markel Ferro, Oier Lopez de LacalleAbstract
Current dialogue systems struggle with dynamic information retrieval, often leading to hallucinations and lower response accuracy. We address this by adapting the ReAct framework for Task-Oriented Dialogue, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to access external knowledge and produce factual responses. Mainly, we propose an unsupervised fine-tuning pipeline that harvests reasoning trajectories via in-context learning inference. High-quality samples are filtered using an LLM-based judge to construct a robust training set. This is enhanced by a unsupervised self-improvement loop, where improved checkpoints generate increasingly better trajectories for subsequent fine-tuning iterations. Experiments on the SIMMC dataset demonstrate that ReAct-based systems outperform baselines due to superior reasoning and tool use. Notably, our fine-tuned 8B model surpasses a 70B in-context system. Finally, we present an error analysis, impact of scene complexity, and cross-domain generalization.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30426
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Read the Room, Read the Image: Understanding Indirect Speech Acts in Multimodal Visual Contexts
2026-08-31 05:28:32Jaehee Kim, Ji Hoon Chung, Seoyoon Park, Unsol Kim, Kyungwon Park, Ji Hak Kim, Yi-Jun Chen, Hansaem KimAbstract
Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-based studies and existing multimodal benchmarks largely overlook this requirement, focusing instead on explicitly encoded context or perceptual recognition, and thus underex- plore context-dependent pragmatic understand- ing, particularly in high-context languages such as Korean. We introduce READI, a multimodal benchmark for evaluating ISA understanding through integrated reasoning over visual con- text and dialogue. READI models graded in- directness grounded in pragmatic theory and formulates the task as vision-based pragmatic question answering (V-PQA), supporting cross- lingual evaluation in English and Korean. Ex- periments show that even state-of-the-art multi- modal models struggle with visually grounded indirect speech acts, with performance declin- ing as indirectness increases, underscoring the need for benchmarks that explicitly target con- textual pragmatic reasoning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30270
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TAKE 85: Testing Audiovisual filmmaKer's intEnt across 85 Hours of Film
2026-08-30 22:22:14Kaishuu Shinozaki-Conefrey, Olivier Pascaud, Robin Courant, Xi Wang, Dimitris Samaras, Vicky KalogeitonAbstract
Films communicate through deliberate creative choices, including lighting, color, composition, editing, dialogue, music, and sound. Humans naturally interpret these signals as directorial intent, yet current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are evaluated almost exclusively on understanding what happens rather than why it is presented that way. We introduce TAKE 85, the first benchmark for directorial-intent understanding, comprising 398 short films (85 hours) with expert-verified question-answer pairs spanning global and fine-grained visual and audio intent. Through controlled modality ablations, TAKE 85 enables systematic evaluation of multimodal reasoning. Experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal a substantial gap between perceptual recognition and intentional understanding: while models accurately describe events and narratives, they consistently fail to infer the communicative role of filmmaking decisions. Our results establish directorial intent as a previously overlooked dimension of multimodal understanding: even the strongest model reaches only 58 out of 100, and our ablations show that no input modality is sufficient on its own. All code, Q&As, and models are publicly available from this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30068
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Life Operators: a self-evolving framework for multiscale life modelling
2026-08-30 16:27:07Shuo Wang, Yike GuoAbstract
Medical AI is moving beyond recognition towards clinical dialogue and longitudinal prediction. Yet a central question remains: how would a patient's state change under intervention? Statistical models learn future observations, whereas mechanistic models describe selected processes. Neither provides a common framework for representing patient state, coupling scales or revising failed assumptions. We propose Life Operators: task-bounded mappings that define three scientific roles. Perception operators infer task-relevant biological states from multimodal observations, Evolution operators propagate these states under natural or intervention-conditioned dynamics, and Generation operators map them to measurable signals. Each role may be realised by equations, statistical models, neural networks or hybrids. Bridge operators connect components with different variables, scales and time steps. Selected operators and bridges form task-specific Operator Graphs containing the smallest set of states and mechanisms sufficient for a declared claim. This modular structure also makes scientific revision localisable. An AI co-scientist may propose changes to states, operators, bridges or graph structure, while independent evidence determines which variants are retained, restricted or retired. Over time, validated components could accumulate into broader multiscale models of the human body and provide a computational foundation for medical artificial superintelligence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00068
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ReTrace: Rejected-Trajectory Conditioning for Speculative Decoding
2026-08-30 12:20:54Luxi Lin, Zhanpeng Zeng, Shuang Peng, Songwei Liu, Rongrong JiAbstract
Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language model inference by having a lightweight draft model propose multiple candidate tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a larger target model. However, after the first rejection, standard prefix-based verification discards the remaining draft suffix, so the computation spent generating and verifying those positions does not contribute to decoding progress. Focusing on DFlash, we show that rejected positions in a rejected suffix may still align with the target continuation, indicating that the draft model can retain useful semantic and structural information despite local token-level errors. Motivated by this observation and inspired by conditional diffusion, we introduce~\textbf{ReTrace}, a rejected-trajectory conditioning method that conditions each draft block on the rejected suffix from the previous round rather than generating it from fresh mask placeholders alone. ReTrace retains the hidden representations of the rejected suffixes, aligns them with the next draft block, refines them using target-aware correction signals from the same verification pass, and admits them into the drafter's input embeddings through gated residual fusion. Because rejected tokens are never committed and target-side verification remains unchanged, ReTrace preserves the lossless property of speculative decoding without requiring an additional model forward pass. Experiments with Qwen3 models across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and open-ended dialogue demonstrate that ReTrace consistently improves average acceptance length and end-to-end decoding speed over its DFlash backbone. By introducing cross-round conditioning without modifying within-round proposal generation, ReTrace is largely orthogonal to existing drafting improvements and might be combined with them for further gains.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29748
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Evaluating the Capabilities of LLMs for Persuasive Dialogue
2026-08-30 12:03:59Jordan Robinson, Angus R. Williams, Katie Atkinson, Anthony G. CohnAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) can generate apparently highly persuasive text, but does sounding persuasive mean arguing well? We introduce \textsc{Persuasio}, a multi-agent dialogue platform grounded in a formal argumentation-based theory of persuasion dialogues that adjudicates logical winners during free-text debates. Using this system, we generated 192 debates on a UK political topic between humans and LLMs, and evaluated 22 interlocutors through both automated adjudication and 9,702 crowdsourced pairwise judgements across 1{,}386 annotation instances. We observed a consistent decoupling between subjective and formal persuasiveness: LLMs dominated the subjective ranking yet performed substantially worse under argumentation-theoretic adjudication, where humans remained competitive. Multi-agent and retrieval-augmented variants further widened this divergence. These findings reveal a systematic gap between rhetorical fluency and formal argumentative strength in LLM-based persuasive dialogues.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29738
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The Situated Identity Test: Distinguishing Persistent Cognitive Identity from Persona Imitation
2026-08-30 08:29:01Jun He, Deying YuAbstract
Large language models can convincingly adopt personas, recall past dialogues, and weave rich autobiographies. Yet this conversational eloquence conceals a fundamental attribution problem: looking the part does not mean having lived the life. Two individuals can share identical public profiles--the same age, hometown, occupation, and personality traits--while possessing entirely distinct private histories, relationships, and acquired skills. When conditioned solely on that shared profile, an agent lacks the information required to determine which lineage is correct. We introduce the Situated Identity Test (SIT), an architecture-independent framework that evaluates whether an agent's behavior is functionally attributable to a specific developmental lineage. Grounded identity requires both appropriate knowledge of recorded experiences and appropriate ignorance of ungrounded ones, bounded by what the identity has actually acquired rather than what its underlying foundation model knows. We prove that any policy conditioned solely on a compressed profile is bounded by an average situated validity of at most 1/m across m colliding life histories on lineage-discriminative queries (at most 50% for paired lineages). We instantiate this framework in SITBench, an evaluation suite designed for 25 profile-collision pairs (50 distinct lineages) across 10,000 planned probes and nine architectural configurations. Supported by an open-source reference implementation, deterministic test fixtures, and empirical pilot evaluations on frontier foundation models (GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5), we formalize the failure modes of persona prompting under profile collision and provide an assurance harness for evaluating episodic continuity, structured state, and epistemic boundaries.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22195
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SIC-Agents: Benchmarking and Building an Adaptive Simulator for Pediatric Serious Illness Communication Training
2026-08-30 00:19:44Zihan Wang, Anita Marie Slominska, Rennie Bimman, Elizabeth Di Flumeri, Amanda Mayappo-Neeposh, Conall Francoeur, Tamara Ellen Carver, Xiao-Wen Chang, Doina Precup, Esin Darici Haritaoglu, Ismail Haritaoglu, Akshatha Arodi, Naomi GoloffAbstract
Pediatric serious illness communication (SIC) is critically important, yet scalable communication training for clinicians remains limited. Compared with other dialogue simulation settings, pediatric SIC poses additional challenges, including multi-party interactions, response to parental distress and strong dependence on feedback dynamics. Existing LLM-based simulators optimize generic dialogue quality rather than curriculum-contingent behavior required for effective SIC training. In collaboration with educators and pediatric clinicians, we introduce the first benchmark suite and simulation framework tailored to pediatric SIC training. Our benchmarks, PitfallBench and DialogueBench, evaluate simulators both at the turn-level and across full dialogues. We further propose SIC-Agents, a self-improving framework that generates a clinician-editable skill document to guide simulator behavior. Our experiments show that SIC-Agents outperforms static expert prompting. To support future research, we release our benchmarks for parent simulation in pediatric SIC at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29481
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Ingest-Time Fact Compilation for Cost-Efficient and Reliable Question Answering over Revised Corpora
2026-08-29 23:04:37Kyle Wild, Yusuke Takahashi, Asako UrakiAbstract
Most agentic question answering (QA) systems do an important part of their semantic work at the worst possible time: every time someone asks a question. When a corpus contains revisions, drafts, revocations, deletions, and sources with different levels of authority, the model must reconstruct the governed current state on every read - then throw that work away and repeat it on the next query. This is a bit like a database that rebuilds a materialized view every time someone reads from it. We present ingest-time fact compilation, an architecture that performs this work when corpus data is ingested or changed. Raw passages are rephrased into self-contained facts; rules governing revisions, deletions, effective dates, and source trust are resolved once; and the resulting state is stored as typed records carrying source and revision provenance. At query time, an inexpensive model reads the compiled record instead of reconstructing it from noisy candidates. In a controlled synthetic experiment across five seeds, the same low-cost model produced the correct value, source, and revision in only one of 30 trials under query-time reconstruction, but in all 30 trials from the compiled substrate, at 12.89 times lower mean read cost per question. On simpler revision questions both architectures were exact, but the compiled path used 21.6 times fewer tokens. A separate test found that fact rephrasing roughly halved verbose Federal Reserve dialogue while preserving high source entailment, but left concise Wikipedia prose essentially unchanged. These results support a narrow but practical claim: resolving a corpus state once can make subsequent QA cheaper and more reliable for inexpensive models. We release the open source, MIT-licensed implementation and experimental artifacts.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29661
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StageWell: A Process-Aligned Chinese Corpus for Positive-Psychology Support Dialogue
2026-08-29 15:13:11Yuxiong Wang, Ziwei Lin, Bo Wang, Yu Zhang, Shiguang NiAbstract
Positive psychology dialogue aims to support emotional distress and positive resource building, requiring models to produce not only empathetic replies but also coherent progression through a multi-turn support process. Existing resources often reduce supervision to turn-level strategies or holistic preference labels, leaving process position, support function, and local repair targets implicit. We introduce StageWell, a process-aligned Chinese corpus for positive psychology dialogue, together with HQS, a structured protocol for data construction and evaluation. StageWell organizes support into a six-stage support process and uses a multi-agent whole-dialogue rewriting workflow to construct 12,445 SFT instances, 1,849 DPO preference pairs, and a GroundTruth subset of 120 expert-revised dialogues and 977 QA pairs. Guided by HQS, DPO pairs are built as process-localized repairs: flawed model outputs are used as rejected responses, and targeted rewrites under the same context and stage constraint are used as chosen responses. Across four 9B-14B open-source LLMs, this supervision yields robust gains in process control, response quality, and safety. Averaged across models, BERTScore improves by 0.037, Q-Overall increases by 1.32 points, S-exact increases by 0.236, and the H-critical rate decreases by 0.167. These results highlight the value of modeling supportive dialogue as a structured multi-turn support process rather than as single-turn response generation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29326
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Benevolent Bias in Multi-Turn Human-Agent Dialogue
2026-08-29 11:42:45Qianqi Liu, Jin Huang, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Hatice GunesAbstract
Bias in human-agent interaction can manifest not only through hostile language but also as benevolent bias, whereby unequal treatment hides behind a warm, positive tone. To make it detectable, we operationalise benevolent bias along two dimensions, tone and treatment, yielding three classes: neutral support, overt bias, and benevolent bias. Building on these definitions, we construct BENEVDIAL, a class-balanced corpus of 362,880 multi-turn support dialogues spanning user and agent demographics, roles, and generators, to support controlled evaluation. We then test two detector families on it: off-the-shelf safety detectors and prompted large language model (LLM) judges. Our results reveal a detection gap: off-the-shelf detectors reliably flag overt bias yet largely miss benevolent bias, while LLM judges catch more under more explicit detection criteria but increasingly misclassify neutral support as benevolent bias, and demographic context amplifies the false alarms. These findings suggest that fair monitoring of human-agent dialogue must look beyond surface cues to whether the agent's treatment is disparate.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29206
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Chat-Edit-3D++: Interactive 3D and 4D Scene Editing via Large Language Models
2026-08-29 08:25:58Shuangkang Fang, Yufeng Wang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Wenrui Ding, Yi Yang, Shuchang Zhou, Ming-Hsuan YangAbstract
Recent work on image content manipulation based on vision-language pre-training models has been effectively extended to text-driven 3D scene editing. However, existing schemes for 3D scene editing still have certain shortcomings, hindering their further development as interactive design tools. Such schemes typically adhere to fixed input patterns, limiting flexibility in text input. Furthermore, their editing capabilities are constrained by a single or a few 2D visual models and require intricate pipeline design to integrate these models into 3D reconstruction processes. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose the Hash-Atlas network, which reformulates 3D scene editing as operations on 2D atlas images, thereby achieving a workflow decoupling of the 2D editing and 3D reconstruction processes. Building on this foundation, we introduce a dialogue-based 3D scene editing approach, termed CE3D++, which is centered on a large language model (LLM) that allows arbitrary textual input from users and interprets their intentions, subsequently facilitating the autonomous invocation of the corresponding visual models. Additionally, we extend CE3D++ to monocular 4D scenes by imposing motion constraints on moving objects and further fine-tuning the LLM by creating a trajectory dataset related to editing tasks, which enables the smaller LLM to schedule up to 30 different visual tools accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that CE3D++ effectively integrates multiple visual models to achieve diverse visual editing effects, possessing strong scene comprehension and multi-round dialog capabilities. The source codes and trained models are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29137
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EmoLASP: Emotion Recognition with Language Models and Answer Set Programming
2026-08-29 04:02:32Thao Le, Michael ThielscherAbstract
Emotion recognition in conversations is increasingly tackled with language models, but these models can be unstable and expensive to fine-tune or to prompt with long dialogue histories. We propose EmoLASP, a framework that combines a language model with declarative reasoning via Answer Set Programming (ASP) to predict VAD scores (Valence-Arousal-Dominance) in conversations. Experiments on a widely used benchmark dataset (IEMOCAP) across six open-source LLMs (3B-120B) and two PLMs (BERT, RoBERTa) show that EmoLASP improves prediction performance compared to using the language model alone, even when the LLMs/PLMs are given no dialogue history in their prompts or input vectors. The gains are largest for prompt-only LLMs, which EmoLASP uses without any fine-tuning. However, for fine-tuned PLMs, the reasoner adds little once dialogue history is available. EmoLASP's LLM pipeline demonstrates the potential advantages of using a reasoning approach to ensure emotion prediction consistency and to reduce both the cost of fine-tuning and the cost of prompting with long dialogue histories.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29035
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Leveraging Turn-taking Dynamics for Intent Recognition in Multi-party Conversations
2026-08-28 22:54:44Galo Castillo-L\'opez, Alexis Lombard, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Nasredine SemmarAbstract
We propose a multi-task learning approach for multi-party dialogue intent recognition that leverages an auxiliary task that models turn-taking dynamics. Specifically, we introduce turn-transition entropy, a self-supervised target computed from the sequence of speaker transitions, which quantifies the predictability of interaction patterns. Experiments on multiple pre-trained models demonstrate that incorporating this auxiliary task improves intent recognition performance, outperforming existing approaches which ignore multi-party interaction dynamics. We find that our proposed continuous target can be learned as a single-task objective, suggesting that it is an actual signal carrying useful information.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28926
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SemKV: Semantic Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization Guided by the Quality Cliff for Long-Context LLM Inference
2026-08-28 22:19:47Daeha Lee, Do-Hyung Kim, Jae-Hong KimAbstract
The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck of long-context large language model (LLM) inference, growing linearly with context length. We show that uniform KV quantization on a fractional-bit grid does not degrade gracefully: under a prespecified multi-seed statistical protocol, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with an affine quantizer is statistically indistinguishable from FP16 KV down to 2.322 code bits/value and collapses at 2.0 bits - a quality cliff in (2.0, 2.322] that reappears in generation-time quantization and multi-turn dialogue and transfers to Mistral-7B. The cliff reframes importance-aware mixed precision: above it, eight model-internal importance indicators are statistically interchangeable, so the benefit of mixing is grid interpolation, reaching average precisions uniform quantization cannot realize. SemKV preserves every token, ranks tokens by a model-internal score, and assigns two adjacent above-cliff precisions, achieving a measured 6.0x storage reduction with no statistically detectable quality difference from full KV (n=900, three seeds), and outperforming FP16 token pruning granted a 1.5x larger memory budget. Replacing the affine base with a distortion-optimized quantizer (TurboQuant-MSE) lowers the cliff in every protocol tested, raising the no-detectable-loss operating point to 7.9x. The recipe: measure the cliff for the target deployment setting, then interpolate above it.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28911
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Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue
2026-08-28 21:02:39Chengqian Ma, Wei Tao, Haoyu Zhang, Yiwen GuoAbstract
An avatar that holds a conversation should decide what to say and to move while saying it, yet these abilities live in separate model families: spoken dialogue models produce speech without motion, and co-speech motion models produce motion only from audio handed to them. The standard remedy is a cascade that first generates the spoken response and then runs a motion model over the finished audio, which requires a second full inference pass and precludes any joint optimisation between the two. We present Motion-Omni, an end-to-end framework in which a spoken dialogue model natively outputs explicit facial expression together with hand, upper-body and lower-body motion, generated directly from the hidden states that produce the speech. Joint training is not optional here: with the speech pathway frozen, motion remains misaligned with the audio, and co-adapting the LLM, Speech Generator and Motion Generator under both objectives is what recovers alignment while retaining spoken-dialogue ability. Supervision comes from a scalable, model-agnostic pipeline that pseudo-labels consistent-voice speech responses with a replaceable motion teacher, yielding 422,856 quality-ranked pairs (1,402 hours). We further release SwDA-500 and, to our knowledge, the first public evaluation protocol for stochastic open-ended full-body spoken dialogue, matching audio across motion systems while unifying rendering, automatic metrics, human evaluation, and latency measurement. Instantiated with a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbone, Motion-Omni-Q7 matches the same-audio teacher cascade to within 2% on reference-free motion metrics while responding 5.4 x faster (RTF=0.78, faster than real time), surpasses all non-teacher cascades on beat correlation and diversity, and reaches a 2.62% word error rate, the lowest among the omni-modal systems compared.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04250
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Stranger, Fan, or Peer? A Systematic Study on the Role of Interlocutor in Persona-Based Dialogue Generation
2026-08-28 15:53:14Daniela Occhipinti, Malvina Nissim, Marco GueriniAbstract
Persona-based dialogue systems are usually conditioned on speaker biography, but dialogues involve at least two participants, and who has access to whose biography can vary across training, inference, and evaluation. Prior work often neglected these aspects, obscuring mechanisms that only appear when biography visibility is toggled separately across training, inference, and evaluation, a three-stage factorisation that prior work has largely treated as a single factor. We study this factorisation on a dataset of dialogues paired with speaker's biographies, varying whether the target and interlocutor speakers see each other's biographies during training and inference, and using an LLM as a judge to perform author identification. We find that (i) training-time visibility, more than inference-time visibility, determines whether models express persona traits through dialogue or fall back on copying biographical text (a known problem/phenomenon in persona-based generation); (ii) models trained with interlocutor-biography visibility copy less target-biographical text than models trained without it, while changing visibility only at inference time has a less consistent effect; and (iii) under asymmetric disclosure, where only the interlocutor sees the target biography, target content leaks into interlocutor turns more often, and dialogues containing such traces are easier for the judge to identify, especially when interlocutor turns are visible. These results suggest that biography leakage into generated turns is an artefact of how interlocutor visibility is configured across training and inference, and separating the three stages is necessary.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28467
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Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents
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Interactive dialogue games test a capability that static benchmarks largely leave implicit: a model must carry state across turns, interpret feedback, and choose valid actions under changing constraints. We study this setting in the LM Playschool Challenge with a 2B open-weight model, and find that many failures are not only broad knowledge failures but also local decision failures: repeated guesses, malformed actions, and violations of feedback that the model has just seen. These diagnostics motivate a training recipe organized around three steps: acquire broad game participation through supervised fine-tuning, repair mechanically verifiable failures within one targeted dialogue-game family using turn-local preference pairs, and preserve general capabilities beyond these dialogue games. In the official final evaluation, our submission improves public clemscore from 10.67 to 38.92 and closed in-domain score from 13.41 to 41.17, while approximately preserving aggregate static performance (44.14 vs. 44.24 for the baseline). Out-of-domain clemscore remains low at 7.88, with the largest gains concentrated in unseen variants of the targeted family. Our results suggest that broad SFT brings most of the model's capability improvement; turn-local supervision can be effective when failure detection is precise, with observed transfer concentrated primarily within-family.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28458
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